VPN for Indonesia or How to Unblock Sites in Indonesia

Recently Tumblr was blocked in Indonesia. Find out how to unblock Tumblr with VPN.

Indonesia is a wonderful island country with a huge population of 251 million citizens. However only 17% have Internet access on usual bases.

Today Indonesia is partly free country. The government of the country blocks Social Media/ICT Apps Blocked, Political and Social Content, Bloggers/ICT Users are arrested.

The MCI regulation on “negative content” was authorized during the coverage period, officially giving power to the MCI to block content deemed pornographic or illegal. This was followed by the creation of four panels to act as consultation councils for different banned topics such as child pornography, hate speech, fraud, fake drugs, illegal investments, gambling, and intellectual property rights. These events were continually challenged by civil society groups, which identified a threat to freedom of expression in the new censorship powers issued without a legislative process.

Blocking and filtering

The authority to block content is granted by the Information and Electronic Transactions Law (ITE Law), provided that limitations are in the public interest and intended to maintain public order. In practice, blocking tends to be arbitrary, as the wording lacks clarity in its articulation of what is considered as “forms of disturbance,” “abuse of electronic information,” “public interest,” and “public order.” Another statute provides a legal framework to block content considered pornographic.

Regulation specified the existing service Trust Positive as the government’s “blocking service provider,” or database of websites with negative content for Indonesian ISPs to block. Trust Positive is a filtering application operational since 2010, managed directly by the ministerial office, with a database of continuously updated websites. In 2015, the Trust Positive website listed 763,126 websites blocked. The majority of blocks come under the category of pornography. Other categories include radicalism, hate speech, fraud, gambling, child violence & pornography, internet security, intellectual property rights, violence and miscellaneous.

How to Unblock Blocked Sites in Indonesia?

As it was pointed above, Internet restrictions are applied by IP address. So there is a simple and reliable way to avoid censorship and access blocked sites – using a VPN.

VPN is a virtual private network that masks real IP address and hides all traffic.

You can use VPN on your PC, tablet, Android phones, iPhone, iPad and any other device which supports vpn technology.

This is fast, safe and secure!

To use VPN in Indonesia you do not need any additional software. All you need is setup VPN connection on your device.

The regulation also detailed procedures for the public to report negative content online or via email, and how to appeal in case of wrongful blocking. Members of the public or website owners can file complaints to remove the website’s URL address from the Trust Positive database of banned sites, and the complaint must be resolved in 24 hours.

ISPs are obliged to implement ongoing blocks based on the database, which functions as a minimum list of required blocks, so each ISP can add more sites. As each ISP can employ different software for blocking, and create independent databases, content restrictions are inconsistent. In the past, researchers were unable to identify whether blocks implemented by three ISPs were based on Trust Positive or an independent list. This creates uncertainty for users seeking redress when content is wrongfully blocked.

The video service provider Vimeo became inaccessible on many ISPs in mid-2014, apparently in response to an MCI directive to individual ISPs and the site’s inclusion in the Trust Positive database for allegedly pornographic content

Since filtering relies on keywords, blocks can be overly broad. Some minority voices, particularly LGBTI groups, suffer from arbitrary filtering. In April 2013, the LGBTI group website Our Voice could not be accessed on the XL-Axiata network, though it was available through other providers, such as Telkomsel and First Media. After investigating the group’s complaint, the provider was unable to determine if the group’s domain fee had lapsed, or if it was formally blocked. In June, XL-Axiata’s customer service said on its company Twitter account that Our Voice was listed in the Trust Positive database, which the MCI denied. However, after the APJII intervened, the blocking was ultimately lifted in September. It apparently stemmed from the inclusion of keywords such as “gay” and “lesbian” in the database.

Besides the MCI, the independent Nawala Foundation provides a free DNS server enabling service providers to block hundreds of thousands of websites for content including pornography and gambling. Its database included 811,190 sites by January 2014, but no longer issued statistics in 2015. Nawala provides a form for website owners subject to accidental blocking, though how it processes complaints is not known.

Content Removal

Administrative requests to delete or take down content are less common. From January to June 2014, Google reported two government requests to remove content from its platforms, involving defamation and nudity. The government has threatened service providers for failing to implement censorship in the past. In 2011, BlackBerry agreed to filter pornographic websites on their devices in Indonesia after the government regulator warned that the firm’s market access could be restricted if it failed to comply.

Media, Diversity, and Content Manipulation

Journalists and internet users did not exercise undue levels of self-censorship during the coverage period of this report. Interference from state agencies has declined significantly compared to past years, but social pressure still periodically leads to self-censorship among journalists, and occasionally manifests online in relation to religion, sensitive political corruption charges, or potential defamation.